A need exists in law enforcement and in many businesses to extract information from an identity document or identity card such as a credit card, driver's license or a passport. In some cases, it is convenient to automatically extract information from a non-official document such as business card or from a semi-official document such as library card, student card, store discount card, bank issued cards, checks etc.
Most of these identity documents contain information in text form. The information usually includes information on the type of the document and information specific to the document or the document holder such as: name, ID number, address, etc. Some of these identity documents may contain information encoded in non-textual form-such as barcode, two-dimensional barcode such as PDF417.
In many situations such as in an airport, hotel, car-rental or at a store, it is advantages to have a system that rapidly extracts the data with high throughput and long meant time between failure (MTBF). Similarly, in a bank, there is a need to extract information from checks. In many of these places extracting information is manually performed by a person reading the information from the document and entering it to the data system by typing it. Manual methods are time consuming and may cause errors.
Systems that are available today are based on scanning technology that is relatively poor in its resolution characteristics when it works with an OCR and the results are not satisfactory due to multiple errors.
The use of video cameras for capturing an image frame out of an identity card is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,642,160 titled “Digital image capture system for photo identification cards” that describes a digital image capture system for a photo identification card using a video camera. The system is adapted to compare the image frame of the card holder extracted from the card to an image frame of the person that hand the identity card. There is no reference as for extracting the data from the card.
There is a need to provide a system that is adapted to extract the data of the identity card in high resolution so as to prevent errors while omitting any information that exist on the card such as state symbols, marks etc.